Product Design
Atmosfy is an emerging technology startup with a mobile app that helps people discover the best dining, nightlife and hotels in their city and around the world through engaging, short-form videos from local experts and passionate visitors.
Quantitative research revealed that the Map tab was the second most used feature on the Atmosfy app, after the Home tab. However, qualitative research revealed that the previous design of the Map made it hard for users to achieve their main goal: finding relevant places to visit easily and fast.
These were some of the issues that we identified
• Lack of rich information - the pins and cards on the map focused too much on UGC video content, but failed at displaying crucial information, like social activity from friends, written reviews, category, rating, price, hours of operation, distance, among others.
• Lack of functionalities to meet basic usability standards - given how challenging map interfaces usually are to users, we knew that we should give them the ability to visualize the information in alternative ways, such as in a list view.
• Users wanted more control on how they visualize results - key features like Filtering were missing from the experience.
• The main actions that we wanted to drive - like bookmarking a place - were not visible or clear in the UI.
Within the span of 1+ year, we got to iteratively improve the user experience for discovering places through the map
These were some of the aspects that improved
• Added a Map & List toggle interaction, which drastically improved usability and made it easier for users to visualize information on the map.
• Added rich place information to pin and card components, which helped users in their process of deciding where to go.
• Added a filtering capability that allowed users to narrow down results by place category, cuisine, price and opening hours.
• Designed a new place drawer component, which hosted in-depth information about the place while still keeping users in the map, since it worked as an overlay interface component. When implemented, this component drove higher total bookmarks for places, higher unique bookmarks, and a considerable increase in place actions.
Impact
These changes positively impacted the way 70K+ users interacted with Atmosfy’s map to discover great places to visit.
